Entertainment

Amazon CEO Reveals Plans For Paid Streaming Video Service

As many of you might know, the D: All Things Digital conference is under way in Carlsbad, Calif. Earlier this week, Microsoft made headlines at the event, having spoken about its plans for its latest operating system, as well as other developments.

Today conference-goers were witness to an interview conducted by Walt Mossberg with Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. They spoke of Amazon’s place as the general epicenter for online retail, and Mossberg also pressed for details as to the future of the Kindle.

And then came the segue to the company’s music and video download businesses. Bezos of course reiterated that he and Amazon are “very serious” about those divisions, young as they are. But then he revealed the company’s plans for a new launch in the next few weeks. The premise of the mysterious development: a video streaming service that will start instantly for viewers and which will operate on an a-la-carte payment model, report Dow Jones and Eric Savitz of Barron's.

Does this mean Amazon is slated to soon unveil a competitor to Netflix, sans a standard per-month subscription plan? Netflix has for some time offered its members the ability to stream movies to their computers. And Netflix’s recently announced deal with Roku is one more item that logically gives Amazon reason to enter the streaming video fold itself. Though Bezos’s revelation is very basic in its description, it seems his company is headed in exactly that direction.

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